This inevitably drives people toward easier kinds of achievement like awards, promotions, and degrees. But a lot of real progress happens outside systems like this! I think it's valuable to have smart people working on stuff for its own sake, not chasing any kind of achievement.
The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart. There were plenty of smart kids I knew -- some smarter than me -- who got horrible grades going through one of these school. Many of them did not, in any real sense, succeed.
Imagine being placed in a room, today, and forced to listen to lectures on what you already know, and be given menial make-work tasks, like adding big numbers and copying letters, and doing that for hours each day. Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.
What's the evidence that G&T programmes achieve better academic or life outcomes?
Sidenote: I read the SciAm article last week, not this one yet.
"Oh, we have prepared a special curriculum for you because you are gifted and hired these teacher to give you room to fulfill your potential and not waste it. No pressure though, if you want to waste your potential and become medioker, just say the word and we will throw away the investment we have made in you!"
"The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast."
If they need something extra, like programs for talented and gifted children, that's an investment. A child that is assigned to a "Program for Talented and Gifted Children" will feel pressure to not let that talent/gift go to waste.
Your solution is to do nothing extra for them, just let them idle away in the library reading random books. Not a guarantee that they wont waste their time/talent by their own doing. While cheap, I don't think it would be very effective.
I would have loved that as a child. The problem was: All the interesting papers/books in the internet were behind paywalls (today we have SciHub and Library Genesis, which are nevertheless still illegal).
It is the essence of individualised teaching.
Sadly, teachers are very overworked these days, don't see how the student approaches homework and have no insight into family or emotional issues.
And the third kind (full disclosure: I was of this kind) get very rebellious and were multiple times in strong danger of being expelled from school (not because of bad marks). I still hated school and love to ask the inconvenient question: Who is the more evil person: The kid who does a school rampage or the politician whose decision not to drop lawcompulsory school attendance (in Germany for example home schooling is disallowed) leads to suicides of schoolchildren. Both people clearly leave traces of dead people.
- Education in this country is a disaster. We're supposed to prepare children for work.
Most of the time they're bored stiff.
- I should've thought that being bored stiff was an excellent preparation for work.
- The school leaving age was raised to 16, but they're learning less.
- We didn't raise it so they'd learn more! We raised it to keep teenagers off the job market
and hold down unemployment figures.
Nah, they're toxic, abusive torture to pretty much everyone.